So, yeah...

For quite some time now, I've been gathering anime wallpapers that I like and chucking them up on Google Picasa. Ever since the very beginning of this, I had just been using the regular web upload form, which only lets you upload 5 images at once. I had been doing this because I originally started out on Linux, which Picasa isn't compatible with. But recently (as in, two days ago), I got pissed at how slowly the Picasa web interface was loading. Rant about Web 2.0 bloat omitted for your convenience. So I downloaded Picasa, thinking it would make the whole collection managing and uploading process easier.

Holy shit, I was wrong.

First off, it uses Internet Explorer's connection settings to connect to PicasaWeb to do the uploading and whatnot. In order to keep some semblance of security on a Windows system, I have Internet Explorer set up to use a nonexistent proxy for all connections. This way, I can specify a list of domains that IE should be allowed to contact via the proxy exception list, thus cockblocking any spyware that tries to use it for naughty things while still allowing through what little actually needs it. Picasa's help wasn't nearly as friendly as Google Earth's help was, so it didn't provide me with the domains I had to put in the exception list. After a little tinkering around, I figured out that they were picasa.google.com and picasaweb.google.com. Go figure.

So, now I can connect to my account and upload wallpapers. The next thing I notice is that it doesn't retrieve a list of all the albums on my account to chuck into the local album list. This means that if I had truly wanted the entire thing to be synchronized, I would have had to use the Picasa software from the very beginning to set up and maintain my entire account.

Now, while I'm noticing this, I'm also noticing that it's scanning all three of my hard drives for any and every image it can find. That would be nice for some people, except all I really want to use it for is wallpapers, which are all stored in subdirectories of e:\wallpapers. So, I dick around and eventually find the dialog that lets me configure where it looks for images, and pointed it only at e:\wallpapers. I even excluded e:\wallpapers\reject list, which is where I put wallpapers that I used to like but don't anymore. Yeah, I still keep wallpapers around that I don't like. I'm a data packrat, though in my infancy: I have less than a terabyte of total storage space.

Anyway, with that configured, my next thought is "let's test this thing out!" I make a test album with no images in it, and tell it to put that on the server. No problem there. Now I select an image to upload and go to upload it. Here is where I encounter the greatest instance of fail I have ever seen. It has no option for leaving the image as-is, the maximum size you can upload is 1600 pixels wide, and if it's bigger it gets resampled. With photos this might be okay, but for wallpapers, it's unforgivable.

The Verdict: uninstalled.